Honestly probably for the better. I can’t imagine what it would be like to accidentally throw away hundreds of millions of dollars, but he wasn’t going to succeed. He was going to spend the rest of his life begging for money to dig up and search for a hard drive, and then not being able to find it.
Yes probably. I wonder if in future places that process a lot of e-waste or e-waste donations would try to access any still-functioning hard drives or smartphones (if they haven't been wiped).
[EDIT: to scan for the most common crypto wallets]
But to what end? Backup everything in case the owner comes looking later? The contents of a drive won't in general become the property of the recycling facility, since much of it will be constrained by licences or copyright.
So if I recycle a copy of the key to my bank account, then the contents of that account become property of the recycler and my own copy becomes valueless if they elect to drain it out?
Don't strawman what I wrote: we were talking about crypto not bank accounts. Also, you know a lot of e-waste gets shipped to LDCs? (supposedly wiped and/or destroyed)
The potential for somebody somewhere in the e-recycling chain to harvest data is clear.
Which is exactly why one of the perks of working in modestly-scaled corporate IT is getting to destroy the storage devices before they get taken for recycling. Wiping keys is quick and effective, but can't match a sledge hammer for unadulterated joy.
A found crypto wallet is really just a copy of credentials that provide access to things described in a ledger, and where that ledger is stored elsewhere. It's not very dissimilar to a found copy of a bank account's credentials.
The proposal here was for a business practice that would harvest and exploit these credentials. The main question was of the legality of this business practice.
There is no strawman here.
edit:
I'm just going to leave this here, and dip out of this nonsensical doubletalk clusterfucked horseshit.
> Yes probably. I wonder if in future places that process a lot of e-waste or e-waste donations would try to access any still-functioning hard drives or smartphones (if they haven't been wiped).
> [EDIT: to scan for the most common crypto wallets]
It was absolutely a strawman for two reasons a) because I never said the digital credentials became property of the recycler, or was legal. You insinuated I did. That's moreover irrelevant because e-waste is often shipped outside of the US or EU, leaves their jurisdiction, ends up in LDCs, and goes through multiple intermediaries ( think like the Toyota "ISIS truck" case).
The other part of the strawman is b) nobody said anything about a "proposal for a business practice", you invented that, honestly no idea why. It's the opposite of what I meant: that individuals at any point in that chain could do questionable stuff.
We can conjecture all we want about the legal basis of accessing digital media that has been donated and shipped abroad to be recycled/landfilled, esp. in an untraceable way to countries without much rule of law; there are tons of reasons why this is unlikely to see the inside of a courtroom in a hurry.
> In January 2021, CNN wrote that Howells "has offered to pay the council a quarter of the current value of the hoard, which he says could be distributed to local residents."
Imagine him actually offering $191 million in cash for a 44 meter x 44 meter plot of trash. $2000 for every resident of the city. They'd riot if it got rejected.
I believe it was mentioned somewhere before that he got his strategy wrong. He should consider applying for a job as a garbageman at the landfill and quietly digging... instead he make a mix of embarrassment fanfare of himself.
> the Hard Drive was 'probably' located 'within an area of approximately 2,000 square metres of the site' and 'within an approximate volume of 10,000-15,000 tonnes of waste.'
There's no way he's digging up anywhere near that amount quietly.
I'd be surprised if you got away with digging around for long before being fired for being in an off-limits area. Seeing as there's all those bulldozers shoveling the trash piles around.
Honestly, a couple million X-prize type situation for a trash goblin bot that digs through the landfill semi-autonomously and retrieves hard drives would have a decent shot.
Still the point they mention in the article would be valid - would such system digging into years of landfill pose a risk to public health and the environment by potentially releasing harming substances and whatnot?
It's a general purpose landfill for a town of 150,000 people and according to the original article he only understood his loss three months after disposal, in which time a further 10,000 tonnes of rubbish had been deposited. That small HDD will be surrounded by much larger items: not just whatever can be crammed into a wheelie bin but also possibly larger special items such as bedframes, furniture, etc. That "goblin" will have to be able to tunnel through compacted masses of steel and concrete while being delicate enough not to destroy the target, and definitely needs to avoid breaching the landfill lining. Probably best not to count on the stability of the tunnel it's making, so it will need autonomous power. Probably easier to go for the moon landing X-prize.
The article says that it was known at the time to be likely to be within a 2000m^2 block, narrowing beyond that will be harder since the rubbish is distributed across it (bulldozers keeping it somewhat level as dumping proceeds, rather than keeping it date-sorted). At the time that he first understood his loss the prospective value was $7.5 million: far from negligible but not a slam-dunk proposition for sifting through 10,000 tonnes of mixed bulk waste while continuing to operate the landfill.
Waiting for the Discovery Channel to air "Hard Drive Wars" following the escapades of dumpster-diving mercenaries that, by cover of night, execute their cunning plans to recover the hard drive in question.
They'd still need permission from the licensing authority technically, waste is a pretty highly regulated thing here and rightly so. Plus, this guy could be misremembering.
Agreed. I became interested in Bitcoin in 2013. In 2017 I realized it was never going mainstream for payments when I saw CNBC talking about it without one reference to actually using it as money. I've become pretty cynical about the movement since then, though I wouldn't mind stumbling upon an old private wallet.
They'd need to provide sufficient confidence that they were going to continue to operate the landfill in accordance with all regulations, not just declare bankruptcy when the hunt is over and leave an unsafe mess and a financial black hole. Possibly the set intersection of treasure hunters with that character AND optimism that the drive remains useful is rather small.
> The council said that excavating the landfill site would let harmful substances escape into the environment, endangering residents with "potentially serious risks which raises public health issues and environmental concerns," the ruling said.
The extreme unlikelihood of finding the drive in a salvageable condition combined with the near certainty of polluting the local community makes it a pretty clear decision to me.
I don't get why there would be any risk of polluting the local community. Just create a second-landfill, properly lined - in exactly the same way thousands of landfills each year are created near to the first one - then just run an industrial-conveyor from Landfill A -> Landfill B. Create a spill-container underneath if you want to be 100% super certain 0.000% of pollution.
Run at a reasonable rate - should be relative straightforward for a team to pick through the garbage, particularly because it's metal.
This project gets rebooted when/if bitcoin hits $1mm.
It would be terrible for air pollution - this isn’t just a big pile of trash, it’s years of compacted municipal refuse that has to be excavated and pulled apart. If you dig through 100k tons of landfil, you will fill the surrounding air with toxic/pathogenic dust.
Kind of interesting to imagine long term inflation due to long term lost crypto. It seems much easier to lose large amounts versus fiat currencies.
Electronic money can be recovered (i.e. its given over to the government if left unclaimed as far as I know). And its hard to lose that much physical cash.
Come on, 'all hard drives' would be fine, that would be a trivial workload to sort through compared to 'I believe it is somewhere in this landfill site'.
You mean a metal detector? Having seen "Detectorists", I can tell you that they can be configured to find metal objects of a certain size. It would take a lot of time through.
A metal detector in a garbage dump would pretty much be going off constantly. There's a lot of metallic waste that gets dumped (toys, mattresses, home appliances, etc) - only digging in places where you sense metal isn't going to rule much out.
If you search thru HN for the various submissions over the course of this case (over a decade old at this point!) you can see the wildly changing values of the bitcoin in the headlines.
Once it was 6M, then 181M, then 80M, now it's 598M! Haha
He first claimed 7500, eventually 8000 BTC. Not much change in his story. The headlines are indeed evidence of bitcoin's wild price swings over the years.
Or his original: I asked her to take it to the dump, she said 'too busy, do it yourself', meanwhile I remembered I wanted to double check which drive I'd thrown out but she'd had a change of heart and taken it already.
It doesn't matter which version. He threw the damn thing in the trash can! He made a careless mistake and tossed the wrong drive. Normally people think about it, learn a thing or two, get over it, and move on. Instead this jackass seems to see himself victimized by [checks notes] literally everyone? And he wasted untold human years of other people's time, and eleven of his own, all because he couldn't shrug off a silly mistake and learn to laugh about it. Pointless.
I've always taken this story with a pinch of salt. The timeline is that the guy "had some bitcoin", then lost interest, then the hard drive was thrown away, and then sometime later saw the price and thought he should go looking for it.
Did he actually have as much as he recalled years later? Did he not sell or transfer it for the little it was worth, and forget about that years later? Was the wallet encrypted with a password he won't remember? Did the hard drive get destroyed in the process of being thrown out? Did the data get wiped? Did it even go to this landfill?
There are a great many ways in which this could result with zero bitcoin, even if they find the drive. I'm not surprised the council disallowed it. A 1% chance of £100m is only worth £1m, and it would be a costly endeavour to support.
And even if the hard drive were somehow found, it's probably been destroyed by exposure to eleven years of leachate ("garbage juice"). Landfills are nasty places.
This is going to end up like that pit on Oak Island that people think has pirate gold at the bottom.
150 years from now, National Geographic is going to be making TV shows about adventurers in hazmat suits digging in the landfill for the lost private key.
150 years from now, bitcoin will most likely have zero value.
There's far too much happening in the world to assume the shape of it will hold up that long, even if you're the biggest bitcoin bull.
AI/AGI/ASI, quantum and post-quantum computing, WWIII and nuclear war, the space race, etc. And that's just scratching the surface of what might happen.
I know brute force guessing a Bitcoin key is like an astronomical lottery ticket, but the odds can't be much worse than extracting a working hard drive from 15,000 tons of decade-old trash.
There’s a chance that if Moore’s Law holds, a computer might catch up after decades of continued exponential growth. But my money’s still on the trash spelunker in that race
That pit is amazingly self-selecting. Like, it's literally a pit, how hard can it be to just dig it up. Supposedly water rushes in from an underground tunnel, but we build bridge supports in actual rivers all the time.
Those who have sufficient resources and expertise to find it know that there's obviously not going to be anything there, which means the only people who try digging for it are those incapable of actually finding it, perpetuating the myth.
I’ve always figured we’ll have robots mining our trash piles in the future for metals and other recyclables. Possibly bespoke, cobbled together, and manually piloted.
Sounds dystopian and probably is, but also I feel like I would kinda enjoy remotely excavating trash as an occasional hobby. You know, hop on the Discord with the gang, make a battle plan, you take the copper wiring, I’ll shore up the tunnel.
I've long wondered what technological advancements would be necessary to make it profitable to mine landfills. There's so much raw material buried in one place.
It's already profitable, or at least net-zero, it's just not politically correct. Here in Minneapolis (more generally: Hennepin county) we industrially incinerate our trash. The site lists many benefits: https://www.hennepin.us/your-government/facilities/hennepin-...
Reminds me a bit of the gentleman who didn’t check his AMZN stock for ~20 years and found out it had gone to escheat with the state of Delaware. They had cashed it out years earlier for less than 10% of its present-day value. His play is to hope the hypothetical value continues to grow to the point that a specialist attorney will take the case and split the spoils with his kids.
The main thing is logging into your brokerage account(s) at least once a year so the custodian knows you’re still active. Laws vary by state but a sounds like it’s often 4+ years of no contact/activity before they have transfer it to the gov’t.
More broadly, you can lobby your representatives to require stricter criteria to be met before assets can be escheated in your jurisdiction. E.g. phone calls, multiple pieces of physical mail or have mail returned as invalid address in addition to the basic timeout period.
I feel bad for the guy. Every few years he reappears in the news making another attempt. Clearly it’s something that’s going to weigh on him for the rest of his life.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] thread[EDIT: to scan for the most common crypto wallets]
And this is supposed to be legal, somehow?
The potential for somebody somewhere in the e-recycling chain to harvest data is clear.
The proposal here was for a business practice that would harvest and exploit these credentials. The main question was of the legality of this business practice.
There is no strawman here.
edit:
I'm just going to leave this here, and dip out of this nonsensical doubletalk clusterfucked horseshit.
> Yes probably. I wonder if in future places that process a lot of e-waste or e-waste donations would try to access any still-functioning hard drives or smartphones (if they haven't been wiped).
> [EDIT: to scan for the most common crypto wallets]
The other part of the strawman is b) nobody said anything about a "proposal for a business practice", you invented that, honestly no idea why. It's the opposite of what I meant: that individuals at any point in that chain could do questionable stuff.
We can conjecture all we want about the legal basis of accessing digital media that has been donated and shipped abroad to be recycled/landfilled, esp. in an untraceable way to countries without much rule of law; there are tons of reasons why this is unlikely to see the inside of a courtroom in a hurry.
Not that the guy would see any of that money either though.
Perhaps if he had offered to pay in advance...
There's no way he's digging up anywhere near that amount quietly.
Dilution in time counts as well.
If you could somehow guarantee that there is a hard drive with a recoverable $765M on it in that landfill, that would be a very different scenario.
The extreme unlikelihood of finding the drive in a salvageable condition combined with the near certainty of polluting the local community makes it a pretty clear decision to me.
Run at a reasonable rate - should be relative straightforward for a team to pick through the garbage, particularly because it's metal.
This project gets rebooted when/if bitcoin hits $1mm.
Electronic money can be recovered (i.e. its given over to the government if left unclaimed as far as I know). And its hard to lose that much physical cash.
E.g. destroy half the gold in the world, price doubles...
If you search thru HN for the various submissions over the course of this case (over a decade old at this point!) you can see the wildly changing values of the bitcoin in the headlines. Once it was 6M, then 181M, then 80M, now it's 598M! Haha
> Howells claims it "was taken from his home without his permission or consent on the morning of 5th August 2013"
Did he actually have as much as he recalled years later? Did he not sell or transfer it for the little it was worth, and forget about that years later? Was the wallet encrypted with a password he won't remember? Did the hard drive get destroyed in the process of being thrown out? Did the data get wiped? Did it even go to this landfill?
There are a great many ways in which this could result with zero bitcoin, even if they find the drive. I'm not surprised the council disallowed it. A 1% chance of £100m is only worth £1m, and it would be a costly endeavour to support.
150 years from now, National Geographic is going to be making TV shows about adventurers in hazmat suits digging in the landfill for the lost private key.
There's far too much happening in the world to assume the shape of it will hold up that long, even if you're the biggest bitcoin bull.
AI/AGI/ASI, quantum and post-quantum computing, WWIII and nuclear war, the space race, etc. And that's just scratching the surface of what might happen.
I agree that it'll likely be worthless in 150 years. We just don't need any massive upheaval for that to happen.
But finding one of 2^256 private keys would take millions of years. This math felt correctly conservative https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/how-long-wo...
There’s a chance that if Moore’s Law holds, a computer might catch up after decades of continued exponential growth. But my money’s still on the trash spelunker in that race
Those who have sufficient resources and expertise to find it know that there's obviously not going to be anything there, which means the only people who try digging for it are those incapable of actually finding it, perpetuating the myth.
Sounds dystopian and probably is, but also I feel like I would kinda enjoy remotely excavating trash as an occasional hobby. You know, hop on the Discord with the gang, make a battle plan, you take the copper wiring, I’ll shore up the tunnel.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159
More broadly, you can lobby your representatives to require stricter criteria to be met before assets can be escheated in your jurisdiction. E.g. phone calls, multiple pieces of physical mail or have mail returned as invalid address in addition to the basic timeout period.